How do I detect when a user is sitting in the chair in front of a computer? [closed]

"How about ""requiring"" your ""employees"" to wear RFID bracelets and install readers at each workstation that reports what RFID tag(s) are present at their location once every 10 seconds or so?

//I can think of no ways that this plan could go wrong."

"A script to send a ""user away"" message to the server upon an inactivity timeout seems by far the easiest. Coupling that with a screensaver that requires authentication would also make it effective at verifying that the user is the correct user.

That being said, if you're going to try to use this system for what we're all assuming you're using it for, you've got much bigger problems than this is going to solve."
"A script to send a ""user away"" message to the server upon an inactivity timeout seems by far the easiest. Coupling that with a screensaver that requires authentication would also make it effective at verifying that the user is the correct user.

That being said, if you're going to try to use this system for what we're all assuming you're using it for, you've got much bigger problems than this is going to solve."

"Any Instant Messaging and Presence platform will provide presence and notification information in scriptable form. For Windows there's Office Live Communications Server and Office Communicator.

To get it working on all platforms, you'd need some magic though. There's always Jabber and other conferencing solutions like that Cisco platform - but what you need most is something that is completely and seamlessly integrated with the client OS and user authentication, lock/unlock as well which is a tad more work... at least if you want it reliable and mandatory (easy with Communicator for Windows).

The part that won't work is the requirement of ""identifying a user without them authenticating themselves""... ^^

If the user leaves the workstation, they should either lock it or log out depending on their plans. If they log in or unlock another workstation you'd know just by looking at your central authentication records. If they're lazy, give them smartcards, wireless dongles or some other password-replacement method of authentication. Adjust timeouts for locked (and unlocked idle) workstations to have them automatically locked and then later logged off if the user forgets. Wireless dongles will lock when out of range. Smartcards will (if configured to) lock or log out when pulled. Most password-replacement techs will prefer at least a pin cod as well to (re-)authenticate.

Sounds easy to achieve together with some simple user policies. Whatever mobile device they have they need to authenticate on those as well of course."

You could implement the practice of having them lock their computer when they walk away from it. then you would definitely know they're not at their desk.